This invention relates to parallel processors.
Parallel processing is an efficient form of information processing of concurrent events in a computing process. Parallel processing demands concurrent execution of many programs in a computer, in contrast to sequential processing. In the context of a parallel processor, parallelism involves doing more than one thing at the same time. Unlike a serial paradigm where all tasks are performed sequentially at a single station or a pipelined machine where tasks are performed at specialized stations, with parallel processing, a plurality of stations are provided with each capable of performing all tasks. That is, in general all or a plurality of the stations work simultaneously and independently on the same or common elements of a problem. Certain problems are suitable for solution by applying parallel processing.
Thus, types of computer processing include single instruction stream, single data stream, the conventional serial von Neumann computer in which there is a single stream of instructions. A second processing type is the single instruction stream, multiple data streams process (SIMD). This processing can have multiple arithmetic-logic processors and a single control processor. Each of the processors perform operations on the data in lock-step. These machines are synchronized by the control processor. A third type is multiple instruction streams, single data stream (MISD) process. This processing has the same data stream flows through a linear array of processors executing different instruction streams. A fourth is multiple instruction streams, multiple data streams (MIMD). This processing uses multiple processors, each executing its own instruction stream to process a data stream fed to each of the processors. Multiple instruction streams, multiple data streams (MIMD) processors may have several instruction processing units and therefore several data streams.